The Risk Pool

with the idea of regret.
    “Who’d she marry?” I said.
    “That’s the worst part,” he said. “She had to go and find the laziest Polack in Mohawk County, as if all she needed was another mouth to feed. I told her so, too.”
    “I’ll bet she appreciated it.”
    “You never could tell her anything,” he admitted, “so why try?”
    I shrugged.
    “So why try?” he repeated.
    I said I didn’t know. “Maybe she loves him,” I ventured. “Maybe she’s tired of being lonely.”
    In fact, he looked pretty lonely and confused himself, sitting there in a strange bar full of strange people and strange local customs that weren’t worth trying to understand. It had finally occurred to him, I think, what he never suspected when he left my mother so many years ago. That he could end up alone.
    My visits to Mohawk during this period were no more successful than my father’s visits to New York, and far less frequent. If memory serves, I made the journey upstate only twice during thedecade after I left Mohawk. The timing was all wrong for the first, my father having been out of work for a while and pretty broke. I wasn’t all that flush myself, though I was working two jobs. I’d been in the city about two years then and was trying to save some money. I’d enrolled in a program in publishing at one of the city colleges for the fall, which would mean the end of one of my jobs. Something—some fucking thing, as my father would have put it—was going to have to give. I was going to have to find a cheaper, dirtier, less safe apartment, or take out a loan, or get a roommate, or something. I think that in the back of my mind I hoped that during my visit, the subject of money would come up, that I’d tell my father my plans, that he’d have some money for once and float me a loan. I’m ashamed to admit that I also remembered the loan I’d unknowingly floated him so many years before. That, I’ve concluded, is one of the worst things about not having money; it causes you to recall what people owe you, or what you imagine they owe you.
    But the subject of money never came up. We went out to dinner at The Elms the night I arrived in Mohawk. Mike had bought the place back the year before and it looked just the same as it had when my father had taken me there as a boy. I half expected a young Jack Ward to swagger in wearing a cream-colored suit, his lovely dark-haired little daughter in tow. Mike’s wife Irma was back in her old role as hostess, escorting couples into the dining room with an expression that suggested her indifference to whether the entire party dropped dead. She appeared genuinely pleased to see me though, and my father and I got the best table in the place. It had had a reserved sign on it, but she discreetly removed this and tucked it under her arm.
    “How come I don’t get this kind of treatment when I come here alone?” my father wanted to know.
    “You just answered your own question, didn’t you.” Irma glowered at him.
    “You better marry me pretty soon,” my father said. “Otherwise I’m going to stop asking and then you’ll be stuck with Mike for the rest of your life.”
    “I’m stuck with the both of you either way.”
    We ate a good dinner, and when we finished, I said, “Let me, for once.”
    No check had come and I was beginning to suspect that myfather had called Mike sometime that afternoon to see if he could take care of the bill later.
    We went into the bar afterward and had a drink, which my father let me pay for. “You show the kid your elbow?” Mike asked my father.
    “Big mouth,” my father said.
    I’d noticed him rubbing it during dinner and had been on the verge of asking about it, but gotten sidetracked.
    “It’s a beauty, huh?” my father said now, as he rolled up his sleeve. Mike set one of the red goblet bar candles next to the elbow, so we could see. The grotesqueness of the injury took my breath away. The skin covering the elbow was stretched tight over the hairless, tennis-ball-sized protuberance.
    I said, “Jesus, Dad.”
    “Just water is all, the doctor says …”
    “
Their
doctor says. What do you expect? You think they want to pay disability?”
    It had happened in the spring. Up till then he’d been tending bar for Mike and things had been fine, except people in places like The Elms were always ordering drinks like banana daiquiris, which my father hated making, so when he had a chance to go back on the road he told Mike to hell with